Thread by @TelGlobalHealth

🦇Could clues to the pandemic’s origins have been lurking in the @NHM_London all along?

@sneweyy was given exclusive access to its “treasure trove” of thousands of bat skulls, skins and pickled specimens dating back roughly three hundred years

This is what she found

The Museum’s bat collection, which includes specimens that pre-date 1753 – when the world-renowned institution was founded – is currently being digitised, which researchers hope may shed light on the origins of pandemics – including Covid-19
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…

In total, the museum is home to at least 50,000 bat specimens

But it is the pickled bats, which have been suspended in time with their major organs intact, that could offer the most compelling clues about the origins of pathogens and pandemics

Bats are known to harbour thousands of viruses that could potentially jump to humans

According to a joint @WHO-China report into the origins of Sars-Cov-2, it is most likely that the Covid-19 virus emerged in bats and jumped to humans via a yet-unidentified intermediary animal

By indexing roughly 12,000 samples from three major bat families stored deep in its vaults, the museum aims to help scientists trace where the flying mammals have lived over centuries, and how the viruses they carry “spillover” to humans

This isn't the first time this new technology has been deployed

In a pre-print published in January, researchers identified a coronavirus closely related to Sars-Cov-2 in bats collected in Cambodia in 2010 and held for a decade in Paris’ Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle

“It is exciting, there’s huge potential to try and understand how, when and why these spillover events occur,” says @JonathanKBall, whose team have already started testing samples on a smaller scale

Together with eight other European museums, researchers in London are racing to document the samples before the end of the year, turning disparate records into a digitised “bat library”

@sneweyy has more below

📸 @SimonTownsley | 📽️ @JKellyLinden
telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…